by Alison Moore
She waited only a moment before saying, ‘All right,’ and, as Bernard touched the cornflower to the blue of her necklace and the blue of the buttons on her blouse, she lay back in the fallen leaves.
She introduced him to her parents. Afterwards, her mother said to her, ‘Are you sure, Ester?’ and her father said, ‘You can still change your mind.’
But Ester did not change her mind. She went with Bernard to Hellhaus. While he ran the pub, she managed the accommodation, taking bookings, receiving guests, doing the housekeeping. There is a cleaner who comes very early each morning and does the bar, the public areas, before breakfast, but Ester takes care of the guest rooms herself.
There is not, in any case, a great deal to do. Of their ten bedrooms, they only ever have a few booked out at any one time. Sometimes rooms stand empty for entire seasons. She once left the light on and the window open in one of the bathrooms and did not go back for weeks. Eventually returning, she found the lightshade – a white glass bowl – full of moths.
When she was a girl, Ester was taken on a visit to the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin. She was disturbed and fascinated by the museum’s extensive collections which included fish and invertebrates preserved in alcohol, stuffed mammals, and butterflies and moths pinned to display boards. A few days later, she was in her room at bedtime with the light still on, reading some romantic photo story in a magazine, when a moth flew in through the open window and began flittering around the lightbulb. This moth, which she pinned to the cork board in her bedroom, was the first in her collection, and the moth collection was the first of her various collections, although what she calls collecting, Bernard calls hoarding.
He is appalled by her bookshelves. He asks her, ‘Who needs so many Mills and Boons?’
‘I do,’ she says.
‘Why do you keep all these old lipsticks and perfume bottles?’ he says, opening her drawers, doing one of his spot checks. She has never known what he is looking for. Tipping out the contents of the envelope that she keeps in the drawer by her bed, the brittle remains of a dried-out flower falling to the floor, he says, ‘What’s all this crap?’
Not long after the day she spent lying in the grass with Bernard, Ester arrived in Hellhaus and sought out a doctor. She made an appointment, which was followed by another appointment at a clinic. And while she sat in the waiting room, she thought about those stilled creatures she had seen housed in the museum, an enormous number, and she thought about her own very small collection of night-flying moths. She still recalled the way that first one felt, the tickle of the powdery wings trapped between the palms of her hands.
A few years later, her father suffered a heart attack and died. When Ester went home, her mother said he’d been having palpitations. ‘Warning signs,’ she said, ‘which he ignored.’ And, she said, he’d already had one heart attack which had gone unnoticed.
‘He didn’t notice?’ said Ester. ‘How could he not notice?’
‘Sometimes you don’t,’ said her mother. ‘But the doctor said he’d had one. She could see the damage in his heart.’
At his funeral, Ester’s mother, cradling a relative’s baby boy in her arms, said to Ester for the first time, ‘Where’s my grandson?’ Since then, she has asked the same question, one way or another, each time she has seen Ester, until recently when she stopped talking about the grandchildren she did not have and instead began giving advice on preserving one’s looks in middle age.
Ester does not remember when she started drinking in the morning or sleeping in the middle of the day. She remembers her first infidelity, but she does not remember them all.
She wakes from her nap and sits for some time working on her face in her dressing table mirror, aware that her make-up fails to disguise the dark circles under her eyes and that it probably only draws attention to her crow’s-feet and the little lines around her mouth. Is she too old, she wonders, to have children?
She takes out the little wooden lighthouse which Bernard gave to her the morning after their wedding. She had asked Bernard for this vintage perfume, Dralle’s Illusion in a lighthouse case, a collector’s item, advertised in its day as ‘the most costly perfume sold in America’. There were two versions of the lighthouse case – a silver one and a smaller, cheaper wooden one. She was disappointed, on exchanging gifts, to find herself receiving the wooden version.
She applies the violet perfume, beneath which she still smells of the disinfectant with which she cleaned the guest bathrooms. Stoppering the vial, she picks up the silver lighthouse which is now standing beside the wooden one on her dressing table and which is missing its bottle. Putting her vial into the silver lighthouse, she returns the now empty wooden case to the drawer.
She hopes that Mr Futh will not notice his missing item, but if he does and if he mentions it she will tell him that she will talk to the people who transported the luggage. He will have to leave before there is any answer – in the morning, he will be gone.
She puts on her new dress which is beginning to look a little tired. She puts on her heels and some flashy earrings. Bernard does notice, she thinks, although he is barely speaking to her today.
She goes down to the bar and sits on her stool, waiting for Mr Futh, her only guest today. She is expecting him in the middle of the afternoon. She took receipt of his suitcase this morning and has put it at the end of his bed.
As she sips a drink, she notices Bernard looking her way, glancing repeatedly at her legs. Feeling flattered, she subtly adjusts her position so that her legs are well displayed, crossed towards him at the knee. After a while, just as her calves are going numb, the blood, she imagines, pooling in her veins, he heads in her direction and she turns towards him. Bernard, on his way into the back of the hotel, pauses beside her to suggest that she put on some hosiery.
Her mother came to visit once and Ester took her out for a stroll. They walked as far as the ferry point and then went for coffee and cake in the café near the train station. Ester told all the funny stories she could think of and her mother said, ‘Come home.’
When it is approaching sundown and Mr Futh has still not arrived, Ester remembers that he was late the previous weekend, although she cannot really remember him, cannot picture him at all.
She has a cup of good coffee in front of her, and an orange. The new girl is behind the bar with not enough to do. Bernard is sitting at a table with a drink and his newspaper, doing the crossword. Ester peels her orange onto the bar and a sweet, citrussy mist surrounds her, masking a warm meat smell. When the door opens, the three of them look up.
A thin man enters. He has caught the sun on his face, even though it is greasy with sun cream. Beneath what there is of his hair, his scalp is bright pink. His feet are in a dreadful state. Ester watches the man hobbling towards the bar. He makes a beeline for the new girl before glancing at Ester and turning in her direction instead.
Even though she has been expecting him, it is not until he is standing in front of her saying hello, saying her name, that she realises that this is Mr Futh. She can feel the heat coming off his skin. He asks for his room and she gives him the key. He says, ‘I’d be very grateful if you would bring my supper to my room,’ and then, after gazing at his feet for a while as if he is trying to think of something, he walks towards the lift.
She will fetch his supper when she has finished her orange. She turns back to the bar, and the new girl goes back to inspecting her nails, and only Bernard continues to stare at the doorway through which Mr Futh has disappeared.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Camphor
Futh stands in the lift. The door is closed but he has not yet pressed the button which will take him up to his room. He stood in front of Ester feeling very peculiar, no doubt due to sunburn, sunstroke. He thought for a moment that he might be having a panic attack right there in the bar. Remembering his relaxation technique, he looked down at the floor, at his feet, seeing hers, bare on the unswept floorboards, her high heels slipped off. He was un
able to concentrate, to focus on his feet, on relaxing his toes and so on. He was disconcerted by her. He stood there too long, staring at her feet, becoming suddenly aware of doing so and limping quickly away to the lift.
Now he stands there, procrastinating, looking at the buttons but not pressing them. He wants to go back and talk to her, about his supper – he wonders whether he ought to tell her that he does not care much for salad. He does not want any to be wasted on his account. Perhaps he should ask her for some after-sun lotion – he would like her to come to his room with a pot of cold cream and, without being asked, dab it onto his sunburn, her cool fingertips soothing his forehead and the back of his neck.
He reaches for the button which will open the lift doors again, before pressing instead the one which will take him upstairs.
In his room, he goes straight over to the bed and sits down. He thinks about lying back but knows that if he does he will fall asleep and wake up there in the small hours or in the morning, still on top of the covers in his shorts and sandals, still in the same position, cold and stiff.
With a great deal of effort, he stands up. Reaching out to open his suitcase, he notices that the zip is not quite done up. He wonders whether he was careless that morning or whether it came undone, or was undone, during transit. He unzips it fully and sees his clothes neatly folded just as he packed them. He finds no suspicious packages tucked into the toes of his shoes.
He takes out his wash bag and looks for his razor. He has not shaved for days. His wash bag is crammed full of things he does not really need, has never made use of, but which he always takes with him. He has bath salts in there, a bath mitt, a pumice stone.
The bathroom is even smaller than he remembers. He fills the short tub, taking out the neglected bath salts and pouring them under the running water. He puts the mitt and the pumice stone on the side with his razor, undresses and gets in. It is only when he is submerged in water too hot for his sunburn that he realises he did not see the lighthouse in his suitcase.
When he gets out, his skin is very clean and soft and sore. He drains the water, leaving behind his dead skin cells and thousands of millimetres of stubble.
Emerging from the bathroom, he expects to find his supper on the side but there is nothing there. He puts on his pyjamas and moves his suitcase from the bed to a chair and is just about to get into bed without having had his supper when he turns back to his suitcase, opens it up and looks again for his lighthouse. After searching thoroughly without finding it, he stands wondering for a few moments. He looks at his watch – it is nearly closing time. He goes to the door and looks out into the empty corridor. He does not want to get dressed again but he does not have a dressing gown. Stepping into the corridor just as he is, he goes quickly to the lift and down to the bar.
Seeing that Ester’s stool is empty, he asks the girl behind the bar where Ester is. He puts the question in German and the girl’s brief reply is also in German but Futh does not know enough of the language to understand what she has said. He would ask her to repeat herself but she has quickly turned back to her customer. Futh looks around and sees, sitting at a small table, the barman who refused him breakfast at the beginning of the week. He decides not to ask him about Ester, which, besides, would mean him walking across the room in his pyjamas.
He leaves the bar again, gets back into the lift and goes upstairs. After hesitating for a moment in the corridor, he walks down it to the door at the end which says ‘PRIVATE’. It is a fire door. He pushes it open and goes through.
On the other side, there is a further stretch of corridor leading to another door, the entrance to a private apartment. Futh listens at the apartment door and thinks that he can hear something, a woman talking. He knocks. When there is no answer, he tries the handle. The unlocked door opens and he finds himself looking into a brightly lit hallway, at the far end of which is an open door and beyond it a room whose light is also on. He calls Ester’s name. Clearly hearing someone laughing, he calls once more from the doorway and then ventures into the apartment, the door closing quietly behind him.
Futh, making his way down the hallway, calling Ester’s name again, passes a small living room on one side and an even smaller kitchen on the other. There is nobody in either. He enters the end room and realises that the female voice he heard was drifting up from the street below, coming in through an open window.
Near the window, there is a bed, and Futh sits down on it to rest his aching legs while he decides what to do about his lighthouse. He supposes it could wait until morning. He could ask about it at breakfast time. But that man might be there instead of Ester, and Futh does not see him being helpful at all.
While he is thinking, he looks around, seeing the dog-eared romance on Ester’s nightstand, and next to it a bottle of lotion which he picks up. Squeezing some into the palm of his hand, he tries it on his sunburn but it stings.
In the other half of the room there is an en suite bathroom which he did not notice before, but the door is open and he can see that the bathroom, whose light is off, is empty. Near the bathroom door there is a wardrobe and a dressing table, and on top of the dressing table there is a silver lighthouse. He stands up slowly and crosses the room, but as he nears the dressing table he hears someone coming into the apartment. Futh is suddenly acutely aware of being out of bounds, that while he could have explained his being on the wrong side of the private door, the fire door, there is no excuse for being discovered in Ester’s bedroom in his pyjamas. Regretting his intrusion, he slips into the bathroom and pushes the door to.
The bathroom window is open and through it Futh can see the full moon. On the window sill he sees half a dozen Venus flytraps and is reminded of Gloria. He pictures her opening her kitchen door in her slippers, smiling at him and saying as she turned away, ‘Come in and keep me company.’
There was, on the occasion which he is remembering, no supper. Gloria took him upstairs, into Kenny’s bedroom, where she was drinking straight from a bottle of something which she said would put hairs on his chest. She went back to doing what she had been doing, going through Kenny’s drawers, putting his things into a box.
‘He wants all his stuff,’ she said. ‘All these things he never took with him, he wants them now. His dad’s taking him abroad.’
‘Is he?’ said Futh. ‘To Europe?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Not Europe.’ She put a pile of old bike magazines in the box. ‘I don’t know why he wants all this junk. He can’t take it with him. He wants it though. I said to him, “Just leave something here.” He might want a magazine to read when he’s back. He might need a jumper.’ She held one up. ‘This one’s too small for him anyway. You have it. It will be just right for you.’ She put it into Futh’s hands. ‘Put it on,’ she said. ‘Let me see you in it. It’s cold outside anyway.’ Futh was, in fact, feeling rather warm in Kenny’s overheated bedroom. Gloria was wearing a dressing gown but it was as thin as any of her nighties. Futh put the jumper on though and Gloria looked pleased. ‘There you are,’ she said. He picked up a compass and Gloria said, ‘Do you like that? You can have it if you want.’
She excused herself then, leaving Futh to look through Kenny’s things. He put the compass in his back pocket and took an old car maintenance manual out of the box. He was planning on learning to drive as soon as he was old enough. He had fantasies about driving off into the countryside with a packet of sandwiches and a blanket, or taking his passport and driving to Dover.
After a while, Futh went looking for Gloria and found her in the bath, the bathroom door ajar. He realised that he had heard the bathwater running and had heard it stop but had not put two and two together.
‘Come in,’ she said. ‘Come and do my back.’ He stayed where he was, out on the landing, the car maintenance manual held in front of him like a shield, tight against his chest like body armour. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘I can’t reach.’ He put the manual down on the laundry basket just inside the door as he went in.
; Gloria held out a loofah. ‘I used to get Kenny to do this for me,’ she said, putting the loofah into Futh’s hand. ‘I used to get him to scrub my back and give me a little shoulder rub.’ She passed him the soap. ‘He was always very good at it,’ she said, ‘very good with his hands.’
That was the last time Futh went to Gloria’s house looking for Kenny.
Futh, perching on the edge of Ester’s bath, looking through a narrow gap between the door and the frame, sees Ester coming into the room. He watches her, his pulse quickening. She is holding a plate of food – cold meat and boiled eggs and salad – with clingfilm over the top. She walks over to the dressing table and sets the plate down, picks up the silver lighthouse and puts it away in a drawer.
Reaching to the back of another drawer, she takes out a packet of cigarettes and a red Bic lighter, goes to the open window and lights up. Some of her smoke drifts back into the bedroom and some comes in through the bathroom window and Futh breathes it in.
He shifts slightly, knocking into the bottles lined up behind the taps, putting his hand out to stop them falling into the tub. Holding one, he unscrews the top and puts it to his nose and the smell of camphor takes him back to the dark interior of his mother’s wardrobe. It is like being wrenched soul first through time.
Ester drops her cigarette butt onto the pavement below, walks back to the dressing table and puts the packet of cigarettes and the lighter away in the drawer. Picking up the plate, she leaves the room.
Again, she leaves the bedroom lights on – Futh presumes she is coming to bed after delivering the meal to his room, which will only take a minute. He stands behind Ester’s bathroom door listening to her leaving, and then comes out.
He goes to the dressing table and opens one of its three drawers, looking for the silver lighthouse. The drawer is full of make-up, worn-down lipsticks, Ester’s shade of pink. There is some jewellery – gold necklaces and a charm bracelet – loose in the drawer, and lots of the little boxes in which jewellery comes. One of them has lost its lid and pinned to the square of foam inside is what he initially thinks is a moth brooch, before realising that it is a moth. He touches its stilled wings before closing the drawer.